“That’s it,” he says. “Come to Johannes.”
He scans the street.
Too dark to see much.
Couldn’t bear to fit a modern night-vision scope to his vintage rifle.
Doesn’t actually believe there’s a problem—he’s very much playing a game. Lots of people shoot things around here; it’s just on the edge of farm country. He waits for a moment. Watches. Gets bored. Decides to go back downstairs and see about his hot dogs.
The light comes on.
He didn’t flip the switch.
Someone else.
“Hunh!” he says, reaching for the pistol, drops it.
He hops a little, as if he expects it to go off.
Like in Band of Brothers when the guy shot himself in the leg.
Two highly authentic-looking Soviet soldiers stand before him, one in a sapper’s steel breastplate. Both of them dirty and stinking of cigarettes. And gasoline? And lots and lots of sour sweat. One carries a Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifle. The engineer a Tokarev pistol and a handheld bayonet.
A very sharp-looking bayonet dark from scrubbed-off rust.
Is that snow on their shoulders?
“Very funny,” he says, thinking at first it’s two guys from the Soviet team in his reenactor group. Then he’s not so sure.
He’s never seen these guys.
The one with the rifle looks rough.
Like he hasn’t been eating so well.
And like he’s shot people.
The one in the sapper’s plate looks around at the room, enjoying himself. Smiling beneath his walrusy mustache.
Something catches his eye.
“Shto eta?” he says.
Dawes doesn’t speak Russian, but the meaning is clear enough.
The man is tickling a poster with the edge of his bayonet.
What’s this?
John Dawes has a lot of posters, and they’ve been hanging so long he doesn’t much see them anymore. He sees this one now. The bayonet traces a blown-up cover of a Hitler Youth propaganda magazine called Der Pimpf, showing a German tank running over Polish cavalry.
Next the walrus-man looks at the poster next to it, a homoerotic masterpiece showing a brown-shirted, black-tied bohunk with blond televangelist hair and a swastika flag smiling unrepentantly, the legend reading Der Deutsche Student kämpft für Führer und Volk!
John hopes they don’t look at the Russian-language poster showing a huge Jew leading Stalin and a Soviet soldier on a rope.
They do.
“Ti shto fashistskoe gavno?”
Dawes picks out the word fascist.
Correctly guesses the uncomplimentary nature of the second bit.
“Ti anti-semit?”
Remembers that nobody on the Soviet reenactor squad actually speaks Russian.
Some kind of fucking communists for real.
The snow on their helmets and coats has melted.
That was real snow what the fuck?
He looks at the only anachronistic poster in the room, a signed and framed poster of Rush Limbaugh wearing a powdered wig and tri-cornered hat.
Two if by Tea!
From Tea to shining Tea!
Original sweet tea.
No help.
Shakedown keeps barking.
Far, far away.
Like the pistol he dropped.
Now walrus picks up John’s rifle.
John’s Nazi rifle.
Nods and looks up at John Dawes.
Grins.
John pisses his pants.
103
Another gunshot.
This one from the west side of the house.
The high chipping sound of a bullet hitting glass.
“Salvador! Get away from the window.”
Salvador does as he is told, but the bullet already hit its mark.
A perfect hole has appeared in the canvas, just over Dalí’s left eye.
The automaton is unaffected, but the hole will have to be fixed before he takes dog form again.
“Go patch yourself.”
Sal heads for the stairs, another bullet sailing through the window, hitting the wall near the stuffed owl.
Michael hunkers down, sweating despite the chill in the air.
Andrew pops up, steals another glance through his night-vision binocs.
“We’ve got three on this side.”
Two muzzles flash in the darkness.
The bullets turn, striking bricks and plaster elsewhere in the room.
The Brazilian pendant around Andrew’s neck glows warm.
He knows the charm can be overwhelmed if it’s worked too hard; it has already saved him from at least four bullets.
“Let’s wake up Buttercup.”
Michael nods.
“Take cover.”
Michael takes cover.
Andrew hunches low, goes to the window overlooking the front yard.
He stands erect now, well back from the window, in the shadows, but still they see him.
Bullets punch through the window, making the awful pvvvvvt! sound one hears when being shot at, a sound Andrew had been lucky enough never to hear before now. He counts two men in the tree line. Holds up two fingers at Michael, who has scooted himself behind an old plow blade.
It sparks once with a loud P-TANG.
Michael says two paragraphs in the Greek of Archimedes.
Andrew says a sentence in old French.
The vacuum-cleaner beast rears the roosterish brass head at the end of its tube neck, flaps its vulture wings, knocking off its covering sheet. Flexes its chimpanzee arms. Its neck turns, letting it focus its eyes at Andrew.
The lenses rotate.
Shit, is it going to attack?
No, just looking at its master.
“Allez!”
It flaps harder.
Its vacuum motor runs.
It lurches forward, busts out the north window, toward the lake, then turns. Bullets strike it, do it little harm.
Snow blows into the attic behind it.
It steers toward the shooter.
Its eyes flash and something in the tree line bursts into flames.
Screams.
The screaming stops.
Three more bullets whine toward Andrew, one of them from the Dawes house across the street, and all three are turned.
The chain holding the pendant breaks; the pendant falls off, its magic exhausted.
Andrew drops to the floor as the fourth bullet hits brick behind him.
Michael finishes another verse in Greek.
Andrew adds a verse in German to this.
In the front yard, the sound of a long-dead Mustang’s engine turning over.
Now the ground rumbles.
The stuffed birds on their shelf and the terrarium with the replica house shudder, too.
The magi have started a small earthquake.
Buttercup is waking up.
104
Kolya and Vanya kneel in the snowy patch of woods near the house.
The woman came to them as they drew playing cards against each other in an improvised game involving making up insults for each other’s mother and sisters (“My king of spades says your three of clubs was poked down your mother’s throat by the lieutenant’s cock.”) while the tanks took fuel. She sat next to them, shared vodka with them. Told them if they would come with her, they could get out of the coming fight with the Germans. All they would have to do is to kill an American for her.
“It will not be easy,” she had said. “He is a wizard and has many tricks. You may die. But I picked you from a list of the dead; I know for a fact that you will die if you go to fight the Germans. Kolya, you will be shot by a sniper whi
le taking a piss. Vanya, an eighty-eight-millimeter shell will land so close to you that no part of you will be found and known to be you.”
Vanya had been troubled by a recurrent dream in which the sun came down next to him and burned him up completely. Nobody could find him, not even his mother walking the field with an icon of Jesus.
Kolya hated pissing precisely because he was terrified of snipers.
It was as though she had seen into both of their hearts.
“What about the Germans?” Vanya had said.
“Leave them to my friend Frost,” she answered. A white wolf with bony ribs moved between trees, and then Vanya was not sure he had seen it. “Russia will be Hitler’s graveyard even without you.”
“Will I be able to piss without fear? Will you promise me that I will not be shot while pissing?” Kolya asked.
She had nodded.
So they agreed and the three of them drank vodka with a drop of blood in it to seal the bargain.
The next thing they had known, they dreamed they were tiny children with rough skin, and they were hungry, so they ate mouthfuls of flesh from a man.
And then they were jumping from a hut that was actually a truck except it walked on legs.
• • •
And now they are here, together.
Shooting up into a house.
Kolya shot a strange bird that was looking at them.
Vanya thought he shot a man, had him right in his sights, squeezed the trigger patiently and felt the sweet thrill a well-placed shot produces, but the man went unharmed.
To their right, a Russian bursts into flames, screams.
To their left, an engine tries to start, then does start.
The ground rumbles.
Like an armored column passing, but harder.
“My God,” Vanya says.
Kolya points his rifle, but it seems useless in his hands.
The headlamps of a strange wrecked car have switched on in the front yard, just to their left. Another Soviet soldier they do not know had been sheltering behind a large rock near the car, firing up into the attic.
Now the car’s hood becomes a mouth.
A steer’s iron mouth.
The soldier jumps back, startled.
Quick, like a fox eating a mouse, the car clamps down on the man, crushing him.
The car becomes the head of a giant made of tree, tree roots, boulders, and other cars.
This giant grows horns.
Bull’s horns.
It is a man of metal. Stone and wood with a huge longhorn’s skull made of iron.
Headlamps for eyes.
It rips itself out of the ground, leaving a hole the size of a small basement.
Raining dirt and small rocks.
A rusty truck splits itself into pieces, becomes armor plating.
A Greek hoplite’s armor, greaves, abdomen plate, armored skirt and all, wraps in two seconds around the body of wood and stone and steel.
The man still dangles from its mouth.
It spits him out.
It is as tall as the house.
What lands on the yard is not a man, but a lifeless doll.
No bigger than a cat.
Buttons for eyes.
105
“Jesus Christ,” Andrew says, the headlamps level with the attic, sweeping the attic with light. “It’s fucking Buttercup.”
“Yep,” Michael Rudnick says, grinning.
He stops grinning as they watch the Soviet soldier fall from the bull’s mouth, his neck on wrong.
I drove that car into a tree with Sarah in it.
Drunk I’m worthless I should die.
Stop it!
Focus!
You’re a warlock now.
Look what you made!
You have to stop the witch.
Save Anneke.
Andrew says, “Buttercup.”
It looks at him, robes him in light.
“Kill the soldiers. Break the hut’s legs.”
The lights sweep off, illuminating snowflakes as the minotaur heads for the tree line, the ground shaking at its steps.
106
Vanya shoots it, shoots one of its headlamps out, but it keeps coming. It bends for a log. It sees Kolya frozen in fear, quite near it. Squashes him with the log as easily as a man would kill a toad, squashes him down into the soil. Kolya is gone entirely. Vanya runs into thick forest, away from the giant.
Something trips him.
The tail of a dragon?
Attached to a vacuum cleaner?
Now a brass-and-metal beaked head turns to look at him, great black wings spreading.
He tries to point his rifle, but its eyes flash.
I’m burning!
The pain is immeasurable.
Then he isn’t burning.
He’s running through a field of sunflowers, running at a German artillery position.
A cacophony of noise around him, but he feels great relief.
It’s so good not to be burning that he laughs, still running.
Then he hears the whine.
An eighty-eight-millimeter shell drawing nearer.
It’s coming for me, right at me!
He flings himself to the ground.
Still the whine grows louder.
He knows it will land almost on him, seems to see the shadow of it growing on the spot exactly near his head where it will punch into soil and sunflowers and explode.
He will be mixed with sunflowers.
Time for one last thought.
Sunflowers. This isn’t so bad.
• • •
Kolya huddles, mad with fear, when the giant bull comes for him.
It raises its huge tree trunk.
It’s going to crush me! Help! Help!
But then he isn’t in a snowy yard outside a rich man’s house getting crushed by a giant bull-man.
Now he is standing, wiener in hand, urinating on a low stone wall near a collapsed farmhouse.
“Ah,” he says, relieved to feel his bladder emptying.
Relaxed.
Suddenly Kolya feels pressure in his head, massive pressure.
Can’t see anymore.
Hears the rifle’s crack.
Ow!
Sniper!
Kolya feels himself falling in a muted way, as if someone else is falling.
He hears his friends returning fire into the tree line.
A mile away and receding.
He manages to say one last sentence.
“This bitch lies.”
107
Andrew scoots to the other end of the attic, risks a peek.
The minotaur has crossed behind the house, drawing rifle fire from the soldiers on the west side. A grenade lands near it and goes off, blowing off part of one greave, causing it to bleed oil and limp. But it knocks down trees and bellows, flushing the soldier who threw the grenade so the vacuum-cockatrice flies down on him. Its fire magic is exhausted, but it grabs him with its chimp arms and flies him into a tree until his head caves in and he, too, reverts into a lifeless burlap doll.
Exhausted, Electra collapses next to the doll and lies still.
Now Buttercup sweeps its remaining headlight over the backyard again, letting its light fall on a tractor.
As soon as the beam hits it, the tractor changes into the hut on chicken legs.
The minotaur gives chase.
Back around to the front yard.
Andrew follows the action, peeking out the front window now, Michael Rudnick next to him, drawing one missed shot from the sniper’s roost at the Dawes house.
This starts Shakedown barking again.
“We need to take care of that,” Andrew says.
Michael nods.
“You have something?”
“I was saving it,” Andrew says, “but, yeah.”
He puts a finger down his throat.
Regurgitates a golf-ball-sized chicken’s eye onto the oak floorboards.
It floats up, hovers, blinks at Andrew.
Heads across the lawn toward the Dawes house.
108
Anneke wakes up from an awful dream about a snake on her mouth into an equally disturbing dream in which a teetering hut is being knocked down by a giant.
She is in the hut.
Hanging suspended, upside down.
Things slide across the floor, fly up, banging into her.
A bucket busts her lip.
Pain in her shoulder.
The hut has lurched, fallen sideways; she has careened with it, her cuffed arms and feet jerking her short.
The beardy man has fallen, too, yelping as coals from the stove scatter around the hut.
He grunts and puts these out with his hands.
109
Andrew sees Buttercup intercept the hut; the chase was almost comical.
But now he concentrates on the eye.
Eagle’s eye could have done it from here.
He guides it near, nearer.
Puts his own vision into it.
Sees them.
Two Russians, two rifles.
One in some kind of steel breast-gear.
Big mustache.
They lie side to side.
Close enough.
This spell is old Slavic forest magic.
He says “Strike!” in medieval Russian.
The men both look up at the eye, more in wonder than fear.
They have their helmets off, so he gets to see their hair stand up on end.
Bright flash!
Now his sight switches dizzyingly back into his own head; he sees the lightning bolt originate from the chicken’s eye, incinerating it, leaping down into the two soldiers, lighting Dawes’s curtains on fire.
The Necromancer's House Page 31
